Chapter Thirty-Three

July the Fifteenth, Nineteen Hundred Ninety Five

The next day, Davie woke before the sun in the manner to which she was accustomed, to find that the house on Grimmauld Place was a bit more crowded than before with the arrival of Molly and Arthur Weasley's youngest son, Ronald, and another girl by the name of Hermione Granger. Davie made no move to pretend she had never heard of either of them. She had seen Ron a few times when he could barely walk, Hermione had been quite the object of gossip during her previous term at Hogwarts - and most of all, they were best friends with Harry James Potter.

Harry Potter. The Boy Who Lived. The Boy who would have been her godson.

It pained Davie particularly when, for the first time, Dumbledore arrived and requested that Sirius and Davie, especially, were to make sure that Ron and Hermione were not able to contact Harry - a move with which neither Sirius nor Davie agreed to begin with.

Davie felt particularly child-like again in the presence of Albus Dumbledore - Dumbledore had changed, it seemed, so little that it made it feel like they were still in school.

"After what has happened to you, I do not think it really needs to be asked," he said knowingly, placing both of his hands on Davie's shoulders and staring at her from behind the very same spectacles he'd always worn. "But I must do it for consistency's sake - you will, of course, understand," he added with a twinkle in his eye. "Are your loyalties fully with us, Davina?"

"As they have always been Prof --"

"Albus," he corrected with a wan smile. "I'm no longer your Headmaster. A side effect of your absence, I'm afraid, is that have yet to grow accustomed to regarding me as an equal."

"Never -- Albus," Davie said, as though Dumbledore's first name was something fragile which needed to be taken good care of. "But I must ask you, why aren't you able to bring Harry here your--"

"There are things," Dumbledore said in a distant, more somber voice, "that must be kept safe. As much as I would like to see to Mr. Potter's safekeeping personally, it is something I cannot do."

Sirius couldn't help but smirk a bit at the expression on Davie's face as Dumbledore departed to return to the school - preparations, after all, had to be made for the upcoming term. Davie's face looked remarkably similar in emotion to Hermione and Ron - fading, youthful defiance, resignation, and confusion. Sirius also inwardly hated that Davie's temperament was so similar to the way it had always been. Had she been completely different, perhaps he would have been able to forget that she was once his Davie.

Hermione, however, seemed pleased to have found somewhat of a kindred spirit in Davie. Davina Maddux, as Remus was quick to tell Hermione, was probably one of the few who could boast their record-breaking amount of time spent studying.

"Terribly fascinating," Hermione nodded after she had asked Davie to share a story about her experiences working abroad; the frizzy-haired girl's hand itched as though she wished she had been taking notes. "An Auror -- I couldn't imagine it. My parents are dentists. Not a very interesting occupation," she explained, as though she were bashful about talking about their Muggle profession with Davie. Davie, however, smiled and clicked her tongue.

"Believe me, there's nothing wrong with a quiet way of life," Davie said with a sigh in which the nostalgia was only just tangible. "You know, I used to want to be a teacher," Davie pointed out, taking a seat on the sofa across from Hermione, who had for once put down her textbook and actually committed herself to a conversation with this woman.

"Brain like a Remembrall, that one," Sirius spoke up with a casual smirk, though he was sitting at an armchair by the fire with a glass of his choice drink in hand. Davie glanced at him, blinking as though she didn't believe that he was trying to be part of this conversation. It was, however, fair game considering that he knew her better than anyone. "Could always count on her to remember a date off the top of her head - Prongs and I told her a few times that she ought to replace Binns --"

"But I never really cared for History of Magic much. Not at all really, with the way Binns taught it," Davie said with a grudging smile at the memory. "Could never keep my eyes open in class, but I suppose all the reading did pay off."

"Come to think of it, Hermione," Sirius pointed out, gesturing toward the young girl. "She was quite a bit like you --"

"No, no," Davie said, waving a hand in casual dismissal. "I think she's a bit more like Lily. Naturally gifted, quite gossiped about," Davie added with an impish, youthful grin. "Quite the buzz about you and a certain Mr. Viktor Krum roundabout Bulgaria, Miss Granger."

"Oh!" Hermione said, going an endearing shade of scarlet - Davie noticed the girl's gaze drift. Hermione's attention quickly reverted back to the conversation at hand, though, when she realized that she was being looked at. "Yes, well --"

"Young love," Davie mused with a vague laugh, shaking her head.

"Yeah," Sirius said, causing Davie to hush immediately and look at him. "Young love."

"Excuse me," Davie said politely, standing up from the chair and scurrying somewhat uncomfortably out of the room and into the reading room, taking a seat in one of the antiquated, hand-hewn wooden chairs. It took her a moment to realize that she was not alone; a certain red-haired boy was sitting on a trunk at the edge of the room, being rather quiet as he thumbed through a copy of a popular Quidditch Magazine.

"D'you see this?" Ron said with a forced smile, looking at Davie hesitantly and nodding downward towards a photo of Harry on his Firebolt, zooming effortlessly through the sky. "'The next Quidditch Star -- mentally tormented or not, that boy knows how to catch a Snitch'. Fancy that. Everyone thinks Harry is insane, and he's still a star," Ron chuckled weakly. When he looked up, however, his laugh subsided as he noted the question expression on Davie's face. "I'm -- I'm not saying --" he stammered. "It's just that --"

"You know," Davie interrupted gently, though it felt strange to realize that she was going to be speaking as a grown woman, to Molly Weasley's child. "When I was your age, the thing that frustrated me most was that everyone knew who I was for all the wrong reasons," she said with a knowing raise of her eyebrows, and Ron blinked at her as though he had just been splashed with cold water, a sure enough sign that Davie appeared to be on the right track.

"For probably my first five years at the school," Davie continued, stretching her arms casually over her head as though she were simply sharing an anecdote, "I was the girl always bickering with Sirius Black, the girl who always hung around Lily Evans -- the girl who was always a little less smart, less talented, less everything than Lily Evans. It was always, 'Davie's good, but she's no Lily Evans' for years," she said animatedly.

"W--what'd you do about it?"

"I became an Auror," Davie replied with a smooth laugh, getting up from her seat and having a seat next to Ron. "But I'm not saying you ought to go and do the same just to make a point. I just meant, I did something that no one thought I would, because it mattered to me. I figured, all the time I spent trying to just be an adequate version of everyone else would have been better spent being a superlatively excellent version of myself." She reached out and gave Ron a pat on the shoulder. "It's a delicate balance. Even I don't get it right a great deal of the time. "

With a lopsided grin, she stood up and made to leave when Ron cleared his throat, causing Davie to turn around with an arched eyebrow.

"Miss Maddux," he said, as though he were incredibly wary about asking this question to someone he barely knew - but if she understand his predicament with his friends, then, Ron figured, there must be a chance she would be able to mention this. "You wouldn't be able to give me any advice on -- on someone trying to date my sister, would you?"

"Sorry, Ron," Davie said with a slight chuckle, placing her hand on the doorknob while still looking towards him. "Only child, I'm afraid." She turned the doorknob and pushed the door open, only to find Sirius standing outside, and Hermione coming down the hallway as well, slipping past them. Glancing briefly over her shoulder at Ron, who gave Hermione a lukewarm greeting. Davie stepped out of the study and shut the door behind her. It seemed everyone was having dinner and conferring about Dumbledore's directions to all of them - Sirius was excluded like he always seemed to be; they explained it was to prevent him from being tempted to get involved, for the sake of his own safety. Now, however, that meant Davie and Sirius were alone in the corridor, save for the sound of the portrait of Walburga Black, grumbling around the corner.

"So," Davie said hesitantly, crossing her arms over herself and trying to block out the various sounds around her, including the faint murmur she could pick up from the kitchen, in order to try and focus on speaking with the man in front of her; Merlin knew it would take a good deal of effort. "Sirius -- about last night --"

"Which part?"

"Oh, you know already," Davie said in slight exasperation, resisting what felt like the very natural reaction of losing her temper with him. Losing one's temper with Sirius Black, Davie mused, had never been particularly difficult to do. "You know - the part where I slapped you."

"Ah." Sirius said with a gruff, forced chuckle, touching his hand to the side of his face, which thankfully bore no mark of Davie's outburst of anger the previous night. "That part. You've gotten a bit stronger. They teach you to slap in Auror training as well?"

"I'm trying to apologize, you don't need to make me feel worse."

"You don't need to apologize." Sirius said, crossing his arms as well, leaning back against the wall behind him in a posture that was so reminiscent of their youth that it nearly caused the hairs on the back of Davie's neck to stand on end. "I guess it comes with old age that I'm tired of trying to convince you that we have anything left."

"Old age," Davie said with a chuckle, uncrossing her arms hesitantly and shaking her head - it occurred her that speaking to Sirius as though nothing had happened, as though nothing was happening, was almost painfully surreal. "Haven't thought for a long time that I'd be talking about it with you."

"Yeah," Sirius said vaguely, scratching the back of his neck - Davie inwardly cursed that all of his quirks and movements seemed to have remained the same after so many years. "I can't really say the same but we've been into detail on this, haven't we?"

Davie's face snapped upwards to look at Sirius, perhaps to argue again until she noticed that he wore a weak smile, and for the first time, regardless of how strange it felt, Davie reciprocated it. It felt a little bit right and a little bit wrong that they were amiably agreeing that the discussion was over, that that part of their lives were over, but the important part was that it seemed that an agreement between them had been reached.

July the Twenty-Ninth, Nineteen Hundreed Ninety Five

The idea of an adult Sirius Black and Davina Maddux being friends was a hard bite to swallow for everyone in the house at Grimmauld Place, but they were forced to believe it when in the days that followed the arrival of Hermione and the Weasley children, things between Davie and Sirius had reverted to a strange shadow of the way they had been before they had even started dating, many years ago.

"Sirius, pass the marmalade please --"

"You don't need marmalade, you need butter, look at you - you're skin and bones --"

"No one asked you!"

"Have they always been like this?" Hermione inquired hesitantly, tapping Remus Lupin on the forearm. Lupin raised a fist to his mouth and gave a chuckle.

"They were," he nodded. "For a very long time - I suppose things have come full circle."

The one good thing that came of it, everyone noticed, was that Sirius was a good deal less sour about being confined to the house, because Davie was under the same sort of house arrest, providing him with a constant companion with whom he could bicker as much as he pleased.

Even more to Sirius' relief was on a particularly stuffy summer day when they received a copy of a Muggle newspaper that depicted a very strange incident in a nearby farming town - in the midst of the hottest summer in decades, a wheat field in the East Devon countryside, near Ottery St. Catchpole where the Weasley family resided, had become frosted over, killing the entire crop.

"I do not think it is our duty," Snape drawled once everyone had finished passing around and reading the paper, "to do an onsite analysis of every unusual happening in the area --"

"I'd like to investigate this one," Davie piped up resolutely, causing everyone to turn their heads to look at her - some with curiosity, some with pity, still others thinking she'd gone completely mad. "I'm still an Auror," she snapped in near outrage. "And I'm still a member of the Order - or did you rescue me just so I could be wall décor? I've been doing things like this for almost fifteen years!"

"We can't let you just leave and risk being taken again," Remus said carefully. "It's only been a couple of weeks - we don't believe we were seen rescuing you, but your trail is still too hot. If something were to happen to you and we didn't even --"

"Sirius can come with me," Davie said suddenly - and Sirius' neck nearly snapped as he turned towards Davie in surprise. In response, she merely shot him a wink before continuing to speak to Remus. "It's a good plan," she explained. "You lot have all been seen, everyone knows you're in the Order. I, on the other hand, have been practically non-existent here for over a decade."

Davie raised her wand and tapped it to her head, changing her hair, even her eyebrows, to an unfamiliar shade of dirty blonde, smiling smartly. "No one's going to ask any questions about a woman taking her dog for a walk," she said resolutely. "And you have to admit, this is an incident worth investigating. Please. Please - I'm starting to get cabin fever in this house."

Scooting her wooden kitchen chair closer to Sirius and placing her hand on his shoulder as she looked around to everyone else, Davie allowed the idea to set in with everyone - and one by one, they showed marked signed of resignation.

"Excellent," Davie said brightly, standing up and giving Sirius' shoulder a sharp tug out of his seat as well, tucking her wand back into her pocket. She yanked Sirius towards the door - he transformed into his dog form as they hurried across the room towards the front corridor - and before leaving only briefly paused to call over her shoulder. "We'll be back before you even have a chance to miss us."

"Dear me," Molly Weasley said, exhaling heavily and shaking her head, looking around at the others. "There they go again - this all seems very nostalgic, those two running off that way."

"If this is anything like old times," Remus pointed out, a very uncharacteristic humor lacing his tone, "then we can expect them back half-clothed a bit hot and bothered, can't we?"

"Sorry," Ron piped up from his seat. "You mean, Miss Maddux and Sirius are --"

"Oh, come on, Ron," Hermione chuckled, jabbing him slightly with her elbow. "Even I could tell that there was something between them."

"Oh, yeah," Ron said, rolling his eyes. "Well, not all of us are geniuses like you, 'Mione --"

"I was only just saying!"

Everyone at the table shared a secret grin at Ron an Hermione's all-too-reminiscent bickering, save for Severus Snape who had long dismissed himself to the study in disgust at what to him was an inappropriate show of frivolity.

A/N's

I know, it's been an uncharacteristically long time since my last update - which is why I'm going to skip the review responses for now and actually get this put up. It's been a very hectic time at school for me, and I'm also struggling to finish up a very delicate scene in an upcoming chapter. Until next time! Cheers!